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Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

> Components, modules and a great UI layout system — just like regular desktop or mobile development.

I don't understand this - I develop for all platforms (web, iOS, Android) and web is always much faster to develop for in terms of productivity. So much that a lot of mobile developers are starting to use web stacks (like react native).

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Early in my career, having mastered Visual Basic I decided it was beneath me and I'd move on to more sophisticated tools like J2EE. When Ruby was born, Java's IDEs and static tooling became stupid, because Real Developers(TM) use raw editors like vim and emacs. Years have passed, I develop less and manage more, but I still use vim and I've moved on to yet other languages.

And now, 15 years into my career, I face the painful realization that VB remains the most productive environment I ever worked in. Yes, it was narrow. If Microsoft hadn't implemented an API for a feature, you waited for the next version.

Therefore, this question does give me pause: Why has the web failed to produce an experience as productive as several (Visual Delphi, anyone?) options over a decade ago? Competition is the web's strength. But it's also its undoing. Personally I think this article is Quixotic—and I prefer a decentralized, ineffecient (JS), sort-of secure (HTTP), competitive web to whatever top-down integration visionaries might push—but I think he—and many older developers—are asking the same question: What happened?

Same here, except replace VB with AS3/Flex. I've since moved on to learn ES5/6/7, rails, and react; react as concept is approaching flex in terms of productivity, but tooling is still not quite there. In terms of raw programming joy, I've not seen an editor as clean as FlashDevelop in years, and I say this as an avid Sublime Text 3 user. Sigh.

I fully agree with you, both on AS3 and FlashDevelop. This coming from a game developer.

People often make this complaint with flash rather than with VB (although VB is also a nice example - thank you).

The web platform aims to solve a _very broad_ problem. I don't know if you've used VB for big projects - but as someone with lots of nostalgia for VB6 (and winforms) it got very painful around the 20K LoC mark and didn't really support complex UIs in a very efficient way.

There certainly _are_ visual builders for web design (literally hundreds - google "React UI builder" or "Angular UI builder" for some examples). They just haven't received adoption. I think it's because people always get weird UI requirements and the tools break. How many UI designers worked with you when you built UIs with VB? For me that number was 0.

In general, UI is designed today in sketch/photoshop and then a tool like Zeplin is used to export the design's properties to code automatically.

You're absolutely right: the web and its breadth of tooling solves A LOT more problems than VB or Flash could ever dream of.

I disagree. I don't know about Flash and I just assume that VB was more or less like an underpowered Delphi. The problem was not tooling at all... at least with Delphi, please see my other comment.

But the web lacks a standard layout and design tooling that all these other platforms have had for a long time.

> people always get weird UI requirements

I would say this is dancing around the issue. The fact is, you need a unique UX, or your app will lose its identity in a sea of competitors. You can't build something interesting by using a library of off-the-shelf sameness.

Tools like VB and UI builders really shine with internal, corporate-only apps that put functionality way ahead of form. You can crank out requirements all day long, and the internal users really don't care much. It's just a tool to get their job done.

As a user, internal or not, I strongly wish that your app WOULD lose its identity. I don't want your app to have a separate identity; I want it to look and feel exactly like everything else I already know how to use, so I don't have to waste any additional time getting familiar with it. I don't want "something interesting", I want "a tool to get my job done", and the more you try to push a brand and make your app distinctive, the harder it is for me to plow past all that and get to what I really want to do.

I worked a lot with Delphi ("Visual" was not in the name, BTW) and I predicted more than 15 years ago in a mail list that web programming was going to completely eat most of the GUI programming.

What happened? Short version: 1) Everybody talks about productivity but nobody really cares 2) "Some" people care a lot about the price of programming tools 3) Web architecture provides for free a handful of requirements that were increasingly being demanded and were difficult to fulfill with desktop programming tools.

Your career seems very similar to mine, I've somewhat recanted on visual designers too, having recently been maintaining some old desktop winforms/c# apps. I think you're being somewhat rose tinted though, those designers could and did shit all over your code from time to time, merging could be a huge headache too.

I still find the middle ground of hand typed code + a decent UI library (Qt, Gtk, maybe swing, etc) to be the best middle ground for productivity. I find it both productive enough in the short term and productive in the long term because it encourages componentization and doesn't encourage spaghetti code in click handlers.

Unfortunately we've mostly seen a transition form visual designers to xml/html and that is a step backwards.

Well, let me tell you my story. The first company I worked in was developing and selling a ERP to several middle-sized companies- we had about 30/ 40 clients, with maybe half of them requesting customizations and new procedures to be added on a regular basis. We were just three developers, and the ERP was written in C. Not even a SQL database, the access to the DB was based on cursors. Sounds like a nightmare, right? And yet, that has definitely been the most productive environment I've ever worked in.

The secret was a well tested and never changing base library and hyper-specialized developers but especially no deviation whatsoever from the standards ("can we have that string in blue?" "no, not possible, sorry"), a very controlled environment to run on and strictly defined use cases.

Even in platforms that _have_ "NetBeans UI Builder" like tools people tend to not use them.

I and my iOS developer friends don't actually uses storyboards for actual UI in non-demo apps because it gets quirky and it's a lot easier to define from code. In Android (and other UI systems like WPF) declarative markup (XML) is often used directly with the view only used to see changes without having to compile (a problem web doesn't have, and Android is getting better at).

Xcode's Interface Builder is just dated. Try Unity3d's component-based UI system with live editing during the "Play mode". It's so great to build everything visually with a tool like this.

How is web faster to develop than native? There is so much lame reinvention of the wheel going on.

I don't have any experience developing for native, but I don't mind other people reinventing the wheel for web if it ends up being a solid package I can import into my own projects, saving me a lot of time. In short, npm is why I think people might say that.

Which wheels are being re-invented on the web?

If you're constantly reinventing the wheel on the web then you're doing it wrong. Especially with the widespread adoption of package managers.

Much of that is because the android tools are absolutely horrid, they tried to make things simple but ended up making them insanely complicated. Compare a hello world tutorial for android (http://www.tutorialspoint.com/android/android_hello_world_ex...) with one for the desktop (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-tutorial/stable/c39.html#SEC...) to get an idea of just how crazy android is.

I think the major reason people use things like react is because of the siren song of code reuse. More often then not, you end up with a worse product and a lot of platform specific work around code.

Don't forget cheap/reusable JS developer workforce.

I admit I don't have much experience with web or mobile apps, but I thought that some UI elements like 'pull down to refresh' or 'bottom navigation' [0] are harder to get 100% right in a web app. Am I wrong?

[0] https://m.imgur.com/a/m63BW

Of course it's a piece of cake with UI toolkits like:

- ExtJS/Sencha Touch: http://examples.sencha.com/extjs/6.5.1/examples/kitchensink/...

- jQuery Mobile: http://demos.jquerymobile.com/1.4.2/navbar/

- Ionic: https://ionicframework.com/docs/components/#tabs-icon-text

- Onsen UI: https://onsen.io/v2/api/js/ons-tabbar.html

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